Smoke and Ashes: Opium's Hidden Histories

"It’s wonderfully written, as you’d expect from a very accomplished novelist. The subtitle of the book is ‘opium’s hidden histories’ and there is an element of that. Opium lies at the base of so much that we take for granted in the world today. It’s an impassioned story, because he’s witnessed the effects of it on people in one form or another and he brings that out very well. He was surprised to find his own family was deeply implicated. They became part of the opium economy of India under the British in the 19th century. They moved from Bengal westwards, to become lawyers, administrators, and accountants, in the vast opium-producing areas of India. So there’s an interesting personal story mingled in. One of the things that surprised him was how much the growth, the cultivation, the refining, and then, frankly, the pushing in the most aggressive way possible of opium, became part of 19th-century colonial history and the foundation of empire in many areas—and also the foundation of capitalism. He writes about the New England companies that became deeply involved in it. A lot of the fortunes on the Atlantic seaboard are based upon the vast profits gained from opium, all under the auspices of states that were happy to push it. Then there was the outrageous behavior of Great Britain towards China during the 19th century and the Opium Wars . If you look at the 19th-century British press, the Chinese were being accused of being opium addicts, because that’s part of their culture. Having pushed opium on them, it then became part of the prejudice against them! The story brings out some of the truly repulsive aspects of 19th-century colonialism. There’s a lot of passion in this book. It’s the historical background to his extraordinary Ibis trilogy of novels . He refers quite often to the novels in the book, which is understandable, because he was writing as a novelist in those three books, but the history was solid. It wasn’t fantasy. This documents it. It’s all there. Interestingly, there’s a coda towards the end of the book about the Oxycontin scandal. He says that we mustn’t think this is all in the past, in the 19th century. Yes, we got rid of one aspect of the opium trade. But the same logic and the same motives apply to opiates. Look at the people who covered up, who protected capital, who protected others, who ensured that their way of pushing drugs and opiates in one form on the population would be protected by law. It’s been very difficult to get at them. There’s an interesting resonance here with the contemporary."